The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [160]
He waited, sighing but vigilant, till Rachel said, "Well, why don't you have some help?"
Gerald puffed and slumped, as if to say that was hardly possible; but then said, "I do rather wonder whether we won't have to send for Penny."
"Not Penny Dreadful," said Catherine. "Anyway, she can't go in the sun.
Rachel didn't contradict this, but gave her enabling shrug. "If you really need Penny, darling, by all means ask her out."
"Do you think . . . ?"
"I mean, she's perfectly pleasant company. If she didn't mind . . ."
"Oh, she's not pleasant company," said Catherine. "She's a humourless white bug."
"Or what about Eileen?" said Toby. "I'm sure she'd come just like that. You know how she adores Dad!"
Gerald gave a short distracted laugh at this absurd alternative. Nick looked at him with a tense smile, an awful feeling of collusion. He'd said nothing, he'd dissimulated much more cleverly than Gerald himself: he felt that he'd been, all passively and peace-lovingly, the real enabler.
"Yes, I'm not so sure about Eileen," said Rachel.
"OK, then . . . " said Gerald, as though conceding to a general wish.
There was a complicated shame-in-triumph which perhaps only Nick could see. The party pushed back their chain, giving hazy thought to the matter of the afternoon, and Gerald went in to the phone room, with a look of tense reluctance, as if about to break bad news.
12
FOR THEIR TWENTY-FIFTH wedding anniversary, Lionel Kessler gave Gerald and Rachel two presents. The first came round in the morning, on the back seat of his Bentley, and the chauffeur himself brought the stout wooden box into the kitchen.
"Darling old Lionel," said Toby, before they knew what was in it.
"Silver, I expect," said Gerald, getting a screwdriver, and sounding both greedy and slightly bored.
Inside, held in a metal brace by foam-rubber collars, was a rococo silver ewer. The body of the thing was in the form of a shell, and the spout was supported by a bearded triton. "Goodness, Nick," said Gerald, so that Nick fell into his role as interpreter—he said he thought it might be by one of the Huguenot silversmiths working in London in the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps by Paul de Lamerie, since the greatest name was also the only one he could think of, and with Lionel anything seemed possible. "Marvellous," said Gerald: "a work of rare device." He looked in the box to see if there was a note, like the watering instructions that come with some worrying plant, but there wasn't. Nick explained that the tiny scene in relief, of Eros playing with the sword of justice, meant "Omnia Vincit Amor." "Ah, thoroughly apt," said Gerald, with shy pomp, putting his arm briefly round Rachel. He perhaps suspected that it was something Lionel had had knocking round at Hawkeswood anyway. Nick carried on smiling at it, half-conscious of how his father would have stooped and turned it, holding it with a cloth; remembering their long-ago visits to Monksbury, where the silver had a brassy iridescent colour, since the servants were forbidden to clean it and scratch it. "We'll have to get that looked at for the insurance," said Gerald.
Toby and Catherine's present was also a bit of silver, a scollop-edged Georgian salver, on which they had had "Gerald and Rachel ~ 5 November 1986" engraved in a curly script. It couldn't help but look dull, and even vaguely satirical, beside the ewer, and Gerald gazed into it with a falsely modest expression, as though he was retiring, or had won a local golf tournament. "It's perfectly lovely," said Rachel. They both seemed gratified, but not excited, and clearly